As soon as he had left the house she went upstairs, took out his mother’s letter, and read it through again for the fourth or fifth time, with her lips tightly pinched and her forehead wrinkled in the effort to devise some reply calculated at once to teach the Duchess manners, and yet to neutralize her opposition. This was what she wrote: “DEAR MADAM: “Don’t worry about Alistair. You are about as likely to see me marry him as you are to see”--she named a sacred personage--“riding down Piccadilly on a bicycle. “Yours truly, “MARY FINUCANE.” CHAPTER X A SCIENTIFIC OPINION THE Duke of Trent and Colonsay sat at his great office table in his room at the Home Office thinking. The table was piled high with official papers. The permanent staff of a Government Department are quick to detect the weakness of each new chief put over their heads by the changing tide of parliamentary warfare. The weakness of the new Home Secretary was for details and statistics. A return of a hundred foolscap pages showing exactly how many pounds of beef and how many pounds of rice are consumed in the prisons of the country every year, or how many miles a policeman tramps over in the same period in the course of his beat, afforded a real satisfaction to his intellect. His staff catered for this taste as if they had been the conductors of a popular magazine. They kept their new chief busy and contented, and he let them alone. But it was not about his important functions in the State that the Minister was thinking at this moment, but about a more personal concern. His discovery of his mother’s project had left him for some time in a state of indecision, due partly to the fact that his desire was not so much to marry Hero Vanbrugh as to prevent his brother from marrying her. The appearance of a rival on the scene is generally sufficient to decide a hesitating wooer, but then the Duke had not been exactly a wooer, and this was another cause of embarrassment. Suddenly to begin paying the attentions of a lover to a girl whom he had been accustomed to treat familiarly as his mother’s friend seemed to a man of the Duke’s stiff habit of mind an awkward, and possibly a ridiculous, proceeding. On the other hand, he saw that his mother was actively pushing her design, and he could not shut his eyes to the fact that Alistair was a rival to be feared. It is difficult at all times for a man with a strong sense of his own dignity to make love, and for a man animated by the calm and temperate regard of the Duke of Trent to try to make love according to the accepted English convention struck even his imagination as dangerously foolish. He condemned in his own mind the national custom which requires the man to do his own love-making.